The present invention relates to wire bristle brushes and more particularly to those used for cleaning food grilling surfaces and the like.
A barbeque grill cook surface or grate is ordinarily made of spaced apart metal rods or bars that support the food a fixed distance from the heat source. The grate rods may be fabricated from welded wire, cast metal or formed/perforated metal. Prior art wire bristle brushes were made from wood or ridged plastic with an elongated handle with wire bristles.
When preparing the grill for cooking, the user would remove the food residue from prior use with scrapers and/or a wire brush. As illustrated in FIG. 1, a prior art brush typically had wire bristles 10 that were retained or attached to a base 12 formed from rigid material such as plastic or wood. The bristles were either molded in place, pressed into holes, or otherwise affixed. When cleaning with a conventional wire brush, the user would press the bristles into the open spaces 14 in the grill surface and move the brush laterally across the surface. This pressure and movement caused the wire bristles to bend as the brush moved laterally across the grill grate surface. This bending of the bristles mechanically removed the residue from the sides and top surfaces of the grill grate 16.
As illustrated in FIG. 2, bending the bristles in the above-described conventional wire brush caused the individual bristle wires to exceed elastic limits of the wire, fatigued the material and permanently bent or curled them. This repeated bending may also have caused the wire to fatigue and break, allowing the detached bristle to fall onto the grate where these bristles could have attach themselves to the food. Also, the pressure applied to the brush by the user was arbitrary. The user might have felt that more pressure would improve cleaning. However, this additional pressure caused the bristles to penetrate well beyond the top or cooking surface, deep into the open area 14 of the cooking grate. In this condition, the top surface of the grill grate 16 was relatively close to the base 12 where the bristles were retained. Brushing across the surface caused a concentrated bend that exceeded safe stress levels (for bending) and caused breaking of the individual bristles with repeated cycling. This condition was further aggravated by bending the bristles in multiple directions.
In July 2012, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning about the dangers of ingesting the wires that break off grill brushes. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6126a4.htm. “The severity of injury ranged from puncture of the soft tissues of the neck, causing severe pain on swallowing, to perforation of the gastrointestinal tract requiring emergent surgery,” according to the report. To combat the wire bristle issue specifically, that CDC report recommended everyone from health care professionals to manufacturers of wire grill-cleaning brushes to retailers to the public be aware of the issue.